A film adaptation of Joseph Kanon's 2001 novel of the same name, it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, and stars George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire.

Jacob witnesses his murdered driver, a black-marketeering American soldier named Tully, being fished from a river, suspiciously adjacent to the Potsdam conference grounds.

Geismer becomes entwined in both the mystery of his murdered driver and the clandestine search by both Soviet and American forces for the missing German Emil Brandt.

She has survived the Holocaust by doing "what she had to" to stay alive — early in the film this is assumed to be prostitution, but Lena (based loosely on the Jewish collaborator Stella Goldschlag[2][3]) is later revealed to be secretly complicit in the deportation of her fellow Jews.

In the film, Emil Brandt is a former SS officer who had been the secretary of Franz Bettmann, Chief Production Engineer of the V-2 rocket at concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora/Mittelwerk.

In the film, they are fully aware of Bettmann's role at Camp Dora and know about the slave labor used in the V-2 program, but want to cover up his involvement (because they could not lawfully employ a known war criminal), which includes eliminating Emil Brandt, whose testimony or written notes could prevent the cover-up.

But Geismer still has Brandt's notebooks, which he now trades in to the war crimes investigators of the U.S. Army (who have turned out to be in league with the other American authorities — the ones who want to keep the evidence confidential to whitewash Bettmann) in exchange for a Persilschein (a denazification document) and a visa for Lena, such that she can leave Germany.

The color was then reduced in post-production through the use of a digital intermediate to a grainier black and white, in order to blend with the carefully restored archival material.

The Good German received generally mixed reviews, with many critics complaining that it was too reliant on style and did not concentrate on the building of characters.

The site's consensus states: "Though Steven Soderbergh succeeds in emulating the glossy look of 1940s noirs, The Good German ultimately ends up as a self-conscious exercise in style that forgets to develop compelling characters.